Unit4 / Agresso
Migrate what the new ERP needs. Archive the rest. Decommission Unit4.
Unit4 Business World, and the Agresso deployments behind it, sit under a large share of UK universities, councils, housing associations and public bodies. When they are replaced, the old environment usually survives for years — because finance still needs prior-year ledgers, HR still needs leaver records and FOI officers still need to find things.
A university, council or housing association replaces Unit4 Business World. The new ERP takes open balances, active suppliers, live projects and current employees. Closed financial years, completed projects, terminated posts and years of scanned documentation do not come across.
The Unit4 environment therefore stays up. It is still licensed, still hosted, still backed up, still in scope for security patching and still on the risk register — serving a handful of look-ups a month and the occasional FOI request.
A Legacy Exit extracts Unit4 finance, procurement, project, HR and payroll history with its attachments into DataVault, reconciles it back to source, gives finance, HR and information-governance teams searchable access through DataLens, and then lets the Unit4 estate be decommissioned.
Two flows, run by the same platform. What the new application needs is migrated. Everything else is preserved and made accessible, which is what allows the old environment to be switched off.
Unit4's flexible element and attribute model means scope is established against your actual configuration rather than against a standard template.
Transactions, balances, closed periods, and the account, cost centre and project element structures they post against.
Requisitions, orders, goods receipts, invoices, approvals and supplier master history.
Sales invoices, receipts, debtor history and income records.
Project structures, budgets, costs, funding and the reporting hierarchies over them — central for universities.
Post and position history, assignments, contracts and effective-dated employment records including leavers.
Pay runs, elements, deductions, pension contributions, payslips and year-end records.
Scanned invoices, contracts, purchase documentation and correspondence held against transactions.
The element values, attributes and relations that historical transactions resolve against.
The Excelerator and browser-enquiry outputs people genuinely run, reproduced against archived data.
Unit4 and Agresso sit under two very different UK buyers. The systems overlap; the drivers, obligations and business cases do not.
Research and project finance history subject to funder audit, institutional retention schedules, and a finance or HR replacement that leaves years of grant and payroll history behind.
University ERP retirement →Budget pressure, shared services and reorganisation, with FOI and audit obligations against the historical finance, procurement and payroll records the old ERP still holds.
Council ERP decommissioning →The parts of this platform that decide whether a retirement succeeds or stalls.
Nobody signs off a decommissioning on the basis that the archive looks right. Each extract is reconciled back to Unit4 and the evidence is retained as part of the decommissioning pack.
Illustrative figures shown to explain how reconciliation evidence is presented. They are not drawn from a specific customer engagement.
A Unit4 finance-only archive is typically weeks after discovery. A full finance, projects, HR and payroll retirement with attachments and a reporting database alongside it takes longer; discovery establishes the duration before implementation is committed.
Work is delivered as fixed-scope packages priced against the scope established in a Legacy Exit Discovery. Projects typically start from £25K. UK public-sector buyers can call the work off through G-Cloud 15.
Published SyntraETL engagements on the same architecture. Every figure below comes from the referenced case study rather than from a marketing claim.
A local council moved PeopleSoft HCM to Oracle Fusion with effective-dated employment history preserved and reconciled.
Read the case study →Finance, procurement and master data migrated out of SAP ECC with source-to-target reconciliation at every cycle.
Read the case study →Historical records retained in a searchable archive so the source environment could be reduced.
Read the case study →Tell us which Unit4 or Agresso version you are on, how many years of history you hold and what you are replacing it with, and we will scope what a retirement would involve.